The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and other regulatory agencies throughout the world are charged with developing emissions standards. Emissions standards are the legal requirements governing pollutants released into air and water, and set quantitative limits on the permissible amount of specific pollutants that may be released from specific sources over specific timeframes.
The EPA and its regulatory counterparts in other countries are required to evaluate scientific data to ensure that emission standards for all emissions types are consistent and based on specific data, such as the impact of the substances at varying concentration levels. Emissions standards seek to maintain concentration levels below a threshold at which species within an environment are affected. Accordingly, emissions standards must be based on scientific data as to the effect a particular emission will have on multiple species at given concentration levels. Available data is used to form a predictive environmental model as to the impact of emissions on species within an environment.
Emissions standards for newly regulated substances must be reasonable and consistent. Ideally, standards for newly regulated emissions are based on a precedent established for other substances to maintain levels of concentration that do not unacceptably impact species.
The EPA and other agencies utilize two primary types of studies in formulating emission standards. Fate studies, which determine how toxins move through the environment, and toxicity/species impact studies, which determine the impact of toxins on particular species at specific concentrations.
The EPA and other environmental regulatory agencies face significant problems in obtaining data to develop consistent emissions standards. First, it is particularly difficult to obtain species impact data for contaminants introduced into their environment. Accordingly, the EPA and other government agencies extensively use mathematical modelling in the absence of field data to determine assumed species impact rates. Second, obtaining species impact data is costly and time-consuming. The EPA cannot afford to test all emissions, and must rely on data from many sources, including studies performed by the regulated industries themselves.
Finally, environmental models are not designed to efficiently predict concentrations that will produce an approximately equivalent impact. These comparative concentration levels are critical for establishing uniform regulations as to the amount and rate at which substances can be emitted into these environments.
There is an unmet need for environmental modeling systems that can predict and compare the environmental impact of toxins and the acceptable emissions levels based on known environmental data.
There is also an unmet need for a system that can produce accurate models for comparison, regardless of the units in which concentration and rate of emission are expressed, and for which the range of uncertainty of the model can be readily identified.
There is a further unmet need in the scientific community for a cumulative repository of reliable and normalized emissions modeling data to preserve, access, share, and validate environmental impact data.